"Bunuel's most uninhibited
venture though audacious and satisfying my Bunuel
pangs, lacks a bite or enough charm to appeal to the
masses. "

Reviewed
by Dennis Schwartz

The
penultimate film of Luis Bunuel ("Diary of a Chambermaid"/"L'Age D'Or"/"The
Milky Way") is an uneven, playful, plotless,
surrealist drama consisting of a series of bizarre vaguely
related episodes that begins with French firing squad
executions from Toledo in 1808, during the Napoleonic era, and Spanish
patriots shouting "Down with liberty!" and a French officer
literally falling madly in love with a statue of a
saint. It ends in modern-day Paris as riot police
suppress a revolt and a dead woman phones her brother
to offer him solace. The most remembered vignette has
elegant dinner guests seated on individual lavatories
around a table and when ready they excuse themselves
to eat their meal in a small room behind a locked
door. Other strange scenes include a bourgeois husband and
father (Jean-Claude Brialy), who upsets the glass
frame display of a large spider on his mantlepiece and
states emphatically: “I’m sick of symmetry.” He's also
in the habit of waking up every hour to find a strange
new visitor in his bedroom: a rooster, followed by an
ostrich, and, also, a bicycling postman delivering a
letter. Another
strange episode has an attractive nurse (Milena
Vukotic) check into an inn. Before going to bed, monks
enter her room and offer her religious relics. Then
they play poker. This is followed by a sadomasochist
couple entering the room and performing a sex show. In
the room next to them, a young man is reminiscing with
his elderly aunt about the wonderful times they had
together when he was a boy. After he caresses
her hands tenderly and, then over her objections, he
pulls back the covers of the bed she's lying in and
miraculously a well-preserved naked body is somehow
revealed.

Its title refers to the
Karl Marx phrase "the phantom of liberty." Co-written
by Bunuel and Jean-Claude Carriere, the
writers declare that most people shun freedom because
of a fear of it. Bunuel's view is that most
people choose to bury their head in the sand rather
than face the realities of life.

The shocker rails against
hypocritical middle-class virtues and is comically
disturbing, but a fault might be that it takes aim on
too easy targets. Bunuel's most uninhibited venture
though audacious and satisfying my Bunuel pangs, lacks
a bite or enough charm to appeal to the masses.